With the holidays just around the corner, it feels like the perfect time to give our regards to Broadway. And we have just the man for the job. NPR contributor Jeff Lunden has produced more than a dozen documentaries centering musical theater, including the three part audio series A Place for Us: Fifty Years of West Side Story.
For The Business, Lunden is examining the many considerations involved with bringing a theatrical performance to the screen (and vice versa).
When it comes to capturing the theater on film, streaming platform BroadwayHD has been a game-changer. Tony-winning producers Bonnie Comley and Stewart F. Lane are here to break it down for us.
For the past three decades, Comley and Lane have been creating live captures of Broadway musicals — their first production being a pay-per-view recording of The Will Rogers Follies at the Palace Theatre for the Japanese Satellite TV in the early ‘90s.
The married duo continued producing video captures of Broadway musicals such as Legally Blonde, Grease, Company, and Indecent (to name a few) for distributors like MTV and PBS without much return on investment.
“Over the years, we were able to capture these shows, and each time just sort of clawing and scratching to get our investment back,” Comley reflects, “I think that with the timing of the technology meets the content, it was streaming.”
In 2015, Comley and Lane brought Broadway into the digital age. While they didn’t “invent the concept of bringing cameras into a theater,” they launched BroadwayHD, a streaming service boasting 100 titles. Suddenly, the magic of the theater was now far more readily available from the comfort of home.
“There were all of these captures that [meant we now] had the possibility of sharing a show outside the theater,” she says. “That's something that is additive to the industry.”
Today, the digital platform offers roughly 300 live captures of stage shows and has become a permanent home for shows like The Phantom of the Opera, Titanic: The Musical and 42nd Street. In 2016, Comley and Lane’s live-stream production of She Loves Me earned BroadwayHD a Guinness World Record for being the first live-stream of a Broadway show.
“She Loves Me” trailer starring Zachary Levi and Laura Benanti. Courtesy of BroadwayHD via Youtube
But the BroadwayHD creators have also faced some pushback from the industry for potentially “cannibalizing live ticket sales.” While they admit the streaming service can never replace the live theatrical experience, Comley says there has been anecdotal evidence that bringing shows like Hamilton to Disney+, and The Phantom of the Opera and Cats to BroadwayHD did not “take away from the sales at the box office.”
“What we're finding is, there's no one size fits all,” Comley notes. “There's no one thing that you can compare something to because each of these shows is so very different.”
“We equate it often to sports events,” she adds. “The idea that you can go to a football stadium and watch a football game or you can watch it at home and get close ups and get commentary. That's what the digital captures provide, is different viewpoints, multiple viewpoints from the cameras in the theater and it gives you the best views in that theater.”
“We're not here to replace the theater,” Lane affirms. “[But] I think eventually all roads lead to BroadwayHD because that's what we do, and when people want that kind of entertainment, that's when they're going to come to us for it.”
“Hamilton” official trailer on Disney+. Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios via YouTube
The smash hit cultural juggernaut Hamilton picked up 11 Tonys, a Grammy, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama following its auspicious 2015 Broadway debut. By 2022, the hip-hop-musical biography of founding father Alexander Hamilton had grossed over $1 billion in ticket sales. The Phantom of the Opera — the Tony-lavished longest-running show in Broadway history which closed in April, 2023 after 13,981 performances in 35 years — grossed over $1.3 billion. And Cats ended its run on Broadway in 2000 after 18 years and some 7,485 performances. It won seven Tonys, and “the distinction of having been seen by more than 10 million people.” Cats is still produced all over the world and its 2019 feature film adaptation has become something of a cult fascination.
It’s impossible to deny the role of early COVID-19 lockdowns in helping to shed the stigma of streaming Broadway shows at home. Hamilton in particular was years away from making it to the screen, but darkened theaters and stay at home orders accelerated the impulse to make the highly sought after show readily accessible. Clearly the appeal has translated far beyond the Hamilton hype.
“What we're seeing now is that after the pandemic, people are much more aware that the digital piece is a way to expand the fan base. People that don't get to the theater because they can't, or they're not comfortable with the theater… they're looking to digital as another touch point for the brand of each of these shows,” Comley explains.
In December, BroadwayHD will start streaming its latest production, a filmed version of the Tony-winning musical Titanic, composed by Maury Yeston.
“We're very excited about this. It's a beautiful production, huge cast,” Lane says.
“Titanic” the Musical trailer. Courtesy of mirvish productions via YouTube
Another filmed theater experience worth keeping an eye on will be the limited Fathom events run of the Waitress: The Musical in select movie theaters beginning Dec. 7. This comes to us via the film company Bleecker Street, which acquired the rights to the show’s theatrical capture.
Ahead of these events, Lunden is catching up with singer-songwriter-actress Sara Bareilles and producer Jessie Nelson about what it took to bring Waitress: The Musical — an adaptation of Adrienne Shelly's 2007 feature film starring Keri Russel as Jenna Hunterson, a a small-town diner waitress and pie maker stuck in a loveless marriage — from the big screen to Broadway and back again.
“Waitress” the film trailer. Courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes Classics
Shelly, who also acted in the original film, was tragically murdered several months before the movie was released. But her work lives on. In 2016, it was adapted as a Broadway musical with Bareilles at the helm as producer and songwriter (music and lyrics) with direction from Diane Paulus (WILD, Gloria: A Life, Jagged Little Pill, ExtraOrdinary), and additional production from Barry and Fran Weissler, Michael Roiff, Nelson and Paul Morphos. Alecia Parker served as an executive producer. Bareilles eventually went on to star in the titular role, originated by Jessie Mueller, who received a Tony nomination for her portrayal.
Sara Bareilles and Jessie Mueller each perform a section of the show’s most celebrated song, the gut-wrenching ballad “She Used To Be Mine,” at the 2016 Tony Awards, via YouTube.
It’s a role that Bareilles is happily reprising for the film run of Waitress: The Musical, which also stars Eric Anderson, Charity Angél Dawson, Christopher Fitzgerald, Drew Gehling, Caitlin Houlahan, Dakin Matthews and Joe Tippett.
Both Bareilles and Nelson made their broadway debuts with the show. “Sara and I were strangers,” says Nelson. “We had never met when we set sail on this, and what we both had in common is we had never written for the theater before, so there was a kind of real plucky bravery that we had because we didn't know the rules. Sometimes that would smash us into a brick wall, and sometimes that would open up the entire second act for us. “So that was a wonderful thing.”
Bareilles jokes,“We leapt into the deep end together, hand in hand, Jessie and I.”
Waitress had a four-year run on Broadway, amassing 1,500 performances and was nominated for Tony Awards in several categories. The show closed in January 2020 but came back in 2021, becoming the first musical to hit Broadway after the pandemic shut theaters down.
“When we reopened post-pandemic…we realized we had this really beautiful cast, and it would probably be the last time these people would be together. So out of that came this urgency to do the live capture,” Nelson explains.
The production was filmed over its four-month limited engagement and that version of the show premiered at the year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
“At Tribeca, we… realized, ‘Oh my god, this is such a wonderful event with an audience. They're having such an intense communal experience,’” Nelson shares. “To me it was such a brilliant idea because it does have a beautiful way of playing in a large space.”
After the festival, Bareilles and Nelson kept hoping the live capture would have a soft landing somewhere.
“We kind of had faith that we had lightning in a bottle and that even though — like everything with Waitress — it might take a while,” says Nelson. it might take time and it might not be an easy road, we kind of had faith that eventually it would find a home. … [And] We hope, eventually, to be on a streamer and let it live forever”
“Waitress: The Musical” trailer. Courtesy of Bleecker Street